The Creators of ’Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’ Answer Your Most Urgent Questions

Nintendo fans love to get personal with the company’s family-friendly characters, obsessing over Mario’s nipples, how big Luigi’s dong is, and what would happen if Kirby were to swallow a hot man. (Disclosure: That last one is actually my fault.) 

Ahead of the release of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, though, one TikToker dared to ask a question not on the hot-button list: Which version of Link, across the long-running series’ dozens of titles, would smell the worst? In a thorough video, @bigthighthescienceguy ranks each iconic hero as he smells fit, ultimately declaring the Link in Skyward Sword the least musty (the game has bathrooms). Ocarina of Time Link, however, didn’t shower for seven years, despite running around inside a big fish and getting bopped by decaying bodies. 

Tears director Hidemaro Fujibayashi and producer Eiji Aonuma disagree. For them, two Links stand out as particularly stinky. Aonuma points to Breath of the Wild’s version of the character, who wears a barbarian-style outfit with a bone cap and furs. “That might be kind of smelly,” he says, noting its “wild animal odor aroma.”

Fujibayashi, who says that “across the many decades” he’s given interviews he’s never been asked to consider which hero is most in need of deodorant, cast his vote for Twilight Princess. Although Link spends much of his time digging through dirt and running through dungeons as a wolf, Fujibayashi is thinking of one specific moment. “There are some scenes in Twilight Princess where Link engages in sumo wrestling with the Goron tribe,” he says. “I imagine he’s pretty smelly in that situation.”

Giving various Links a smell test is just the beginning. In a wide-ranging interview with WIRED, the duo, through translators, also explained their worst Ultrahand creations, how getting lost in caves helped them create one of Tears’ new abilities, and how they approached one of the biggest games of the year. But not before Aonuma shared one final thought: “Actually, Ganon might be the smelliest, if I'm thinking about it.”  

WIRED: You’ve said it was a deliberate choice to make Tears of the Kingdom a sequel to Breath of the Wild. Why was this world, specifically, so important to return to?